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    Gotthard tunnel 32m/day advance: drill‑and‑blast lessons for tunnel engineers

    May 6, 2026|

    Reviewed by Tom Sullivan

    Gotthard tunnel 32m/day advance: drill‑and‑blast lessons for tunnel engineers

    First reported on New Civil Engineer

    30 Second Briefing

    Tunnelling crews on the northern section of the second Gotthard Road Tunnel tube beneath the Swiss Alps are advancing up to 32m per day through hard Alpine rock, a high rate for drill-and-blast in such geology. The new bore, running parallel to the existing 16.9km tunnel, is being excavated to modernise the trans-Alpine road link and allow full refurbishment of the original tube. Rapid advance through competent rock reduces time under temporary support, but demands tight control of blasting, convergence monitoring and rock support installation.

    Technical Brief

    • Instrumented convergence and displacement monitoring is essential to verify stability assumptions in high in-situ stress Alpine rock.

    Our Take

    A 32 m/day advance rate in hard Alpine rock at the Gotthard Road Tunnel sits at the upper end of what our database shows for conventional drill-and-blast in similarly complex European mountain settings, implying a highly optimised cycle and tight logistics underground.

    Given the project’s Safety tag, the combination of high advance rates with stringent Swiss safety expectations suggests that lessons from this drive may feed into digital handover and asset-management discussions highlighted in New Civil Engineer’s recent webinar-focused piece on complex infrastructure data environments.

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    Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.

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